Sometimes it’s hard to understand what my actual stance on something is because I just make really sarcastic jokes on facebook out of context about things that piss me off.
So here’s the “Strange” dope:
The Lovecraft writing community is trying to have its cake and eat it too concerning the World Fantasy convention retiring the H.P. Lovecraft award bust. It’s blatant hypocrisy to claim that retiring the award “because racism” is the right thing to do (or pretending that there’s any truth to the false narrative that the convention decided all on its own with no outside influence that it should go) while continuing to profit from anthologies, podcasts, audio adaptations, biographies, new edits of his literature, magazines, film festivals and conventions featuring H. P. Lovecraft, his fiction and his likeness as the MAIN THEME.
Either he’s (buzz word!) problematic for fiction or he’s not. The man is a KNOWN NAZI SYMPATHIZER. That either matters or it doesn’t. To me it doesn’t fucking matter at all because he’s long fucking dead and lived in a time when ALMOST EVERYONE ON THE PLANET was into Adolph Hitler. He was on the fucking cover of TIME MAGAZINE. He was at the peak of his global popularity in Lovecraft’s time!
Lovecraft fucking DIED IN 1937! He would have come out on the other side of WW2 like almost everyone else, completely reconsidering what Eugenics meant and restructuring his morals and beliefs based on the horrible actions of the Nazi party LIKE EVERYONE ELSE.
Eliminating his likeness from the World Fantasy award SOLVES NOTHING. It’s a problem manufactured by people on the internet WHO MAKE A LIVING solving social problems they created!
All of the back patting and celebration from the Lovecraft writing community really makes me sick. You don’t get to have it both ways. Either you accept the man for who and what he was within the context of his lifetime, along with being one of the most influential horror writers of all time, or his Nazi sympathies and racism are too much of a problem for you. You shouldn’t be able to exploit him, make money off of his likeness AND agree with the politically correct morons trying to erase him from history.
Take a stand for your man and grow some balls.